One of the best ways to improve your visitors’ experience is speeding up your website. In past years, a slower loading website was accepted and, in some instances, expected. Today, visitors expect their websites to load extremely fast, accessing the information they want in milliseconds. As many of the giant tech websites like Google have confirmed, even a half second can make a big difference in user engagement. It’s proven that visitors don’t like to wait, or they will go elsewhere. To keep their attention, we have put together how to speed up you website with these proven steps.

Your Site Platform Matters

As you may know, every website platform has varying load times by default. Whether you are using WordPress, Joomla, drupal or another platform for website development, you need to have a fast loading platform. Your website design and load times are going to depend on it. Moreover, if you decide to use a platform like WordPress, the theme or design should also be performance friendly. This will minimize the number of requests and keep load times low. A minimalistic content management system will give you the flexibility to start with a decent website speed and then improve from there. If you are on a poorly coded platform, you may want to consider switching to a CMS like WordPress than can be tweaked for speed.

Disable All Unnecessary Plugins

If you are using the WordPress platform, disabling additional plugins can increase your page speed. Since plugins are written by third party developers, they are not necessarily the most efficiently written scripts. Additionally, plugins can contain security vulnerabilities. It would be in your best interest, for speed and security, to remove any plugins that are not essential. If you do decide to keep any plugins, make sure that they are regularly updates and can work well with your site. If a plugin is affecting your page load time, you might want to consider another way to achieve the same result without that plugin. This can lower your risk and load times simultaneously.

Implement A Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network (CDN) can speed up the delivery of your media and images. Since images can take a long time to load, a content delivery network speeds up the process by loading images from multiple locations. If you hire a firm to develop your site, they can implement this from the beginning. This is a great way to increase your site speed because different elements can load co-currently.Using multiple points of download, the CDN can drastically improve load times on headers, backgrounds, images and other design elements. Especially for larger images that need optimization, a CDN can cut download times into a fraction of the original download duration.

Upgrade Your Webhosting To The Cloud

If you have a traditional web host, upgrading to the cloud could boost your website speed. The performance enhancement with cloud hosting is very noticeable. Even to the casual visitor, the speed and performance can increase their engagement. Fortunately, the costs of cloud hosting have come down. By learning what public cloud hosting is, you can easily share the network resources of many servers with other clients. This gives you the speed and reliability of running on cloud hosting without the infrastructure costs of doing it on your own. As a result, you will have a high performing website with plenty of resources for fast speeds.

Enable Page Caching For Instant Loading Pages

In addition to all these improvements, page caching can drop your page load times below one second. There are many caching plugins available in the open source communities. They store a copy of your pages to decrease the number of requests made on the site. With a lower number of database calls and http requests, your site will perform better. Moreover, the visitor will have less requests because a single copy will be loaded. This can create one of the fastest load times for visitors. It is one of the most effective ways to lower your website page load times.

Improve your website speed by using these steps. You need to have a reliable platform that is capable of having fast loading pages. Make sure that your website only uses add-ons and plugins that are well coded or absolutely necessary. Then, increase you image speed with a CDN. Combine all that with cloud hosting and page-level caching, your site will be amongst the fastest on the web. With a faster website, visitors will stay longer and engage with your content regularly.

About I2Mag

I2Mag, an Internet & Design Inspiration Magazine having emphasis on empowering and inspiring people by spreading the waves of knowledge. I2Mag is an independent news source dedicated to covering start-ups, reviewing internet products, social media, digital culture and technology news.